BERKELEY — Frances Townes, a longtime community activist whose empathy for — and desire to help — the city’s homeless and runaway youth led her to found the Berkeley Ecumenical Chaplaincy to the Homeless in the 1980s, died Feb. 5, eight days shy of her 102nd birthday.

Townes was a longtime member of the First Congregational Church of Berkeley on Channing Way and was inspired to create the chaplaincy after witnessing people living on nearby streets.

Frances Townes of Oakland died Feb. 5. She was just days short of her 102nd birthday. (Bay Area News Group archives)

“She was responding to people who were sleeping on the church’s front lawn,” said Sally Hindman, a Quaker minister who was director of the chaplaincy between 1995 and 1999.

Townes once said her advocacy for the homeless often revolved around fundraising, trying to highlight the difficulties that homeless people face in their day-to-day lives.

“All the time it was a struggle to get money,” Townes said in an April 2006 profile that appeared in Street Spirit, the newspaper that highlights issues involving the homeless. “It’s very hard to sell these people; they’re the rejects. I felt we were helping the community. We could keep them off the streets during the day when the shoppers were there…. Take them in and feed them and keep them from going to prison and getting to be more of a burden to themselves and the community. We felt that this was a real ministry.”

Townes was married to the late Charles Hard Townes, the Nobel Prize-winning UC Berkeley physics professor whose research led to the development of the laser. She chronicled her own life and discoveries in her autobiography, “Misadventures of a Scientist’s Wife,” published in 2007.

A native of Berlin, N.H., where her family owned a paper mill, Frances Townes was born Frances Hildreth Brown on Feb. 13, 1916.

The economic fallout of the Depression hit the family hard, an experience that would have a profound effect on Townes and lead her in later years to empathize with those less fortunate, according to her daughter, Holly Townes, of Seattle, Wash.

“I think she learned that you can be rich one day and poor the next,” Holly Townes said.

Frances Townes earned a degree in Italian from Smith College, the private women’s school in Northampton, Mass. She married Charles Townes in 1941 after she met him on a bus during a ski trip. They had four daughters.

The couple lived in Cambridge, Mass., while Charles taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then in 1967 settled in Berkeley, where Frances Townes taught English to immigrant women and became an advocate for more adult classes at UC Berkeley.

Charles and Frances Townes arrived at a pivotal time in the Berkeley’s history, just in the wake of the Free Speech Movement and as marchers were hitting the streets in opposition to the Vietnam War.

“I fell in love with the place,” Townes told Street Spirit.

Along with her childhood experience during the Depression, Frances Townes’s empathy for those who were marginalized stemmed from her religious faith, which in turn came from her marriage, Holly Townes said.

Hindman said: “She was the most vivacious person that I have ever met in my life.”

In April 2016, Townes was a special guest at Youth Spirit Artworks, where she was the subject of a tile mural that was created by artist Wesley Wright and homeless youths. The interfaith program on Alcatraz Avenue also memorialized her with a bench.

“Her personal experiences, broader struggles and triumphs have helped redefine the role of women in the modern world,” the Optical Society of America, an organization made up of scientists and others who champion optics and photonics, posted on its website after Frances Townes’s death.

While Townes was a longtime resident of Berkeley, she died in Oakland, where a caregiver was looking after her. Charles Townes died in 2015 at age 99.

“She was really sad that she did not see a woman president in her lifetime,” Holly Townes said.

Crews from several fire departments are battling a major grass fire late Saturday afternoon that has claimed at least 500 acres in a rural area in Solano County between Vacaville and Winters, and is prompting mandatory evacuations, firefighters said.